Whatever your thoughts are on Halloween, it's a time of rich history and cultural traditions. People around the world are celebrating some variation on the theme at the end of October and in early November, from Samhain to Dia de Los Muertos. I've put together a list of video treats and tricks to delight you and your students.

I couldn't resist this disarmingly cute little girl chanting the classic rhyme, complete with popsicle stick props. I also found an animated version, mapped to the standards in English Language Arts for kindergarten and first grade, no less.

More Resources for Halloween Teaching and Learning

With a little craftiness, you can harness all that ghoulish energy and get your kids engaged in all kinds of Halloween activities that relate to core content, as well as a few that are just for fun. I've collected some roundup pages with lesson plans, projects, and other resources.

This year, I was able to use Halloween and other fall traditions to teach text structures with different expository texts on the history of Halloween for some of my classes. I've also used it to review literary elements from Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven. I have downloaded The Simpson's Treehouse of Terror where James Earl Jones reads the poem much more effectively than I would and it's a nice treat to see how serious literature and pop culture meet up.

This year I used Halloween to teach gothic elements that show up in our literature by examining the Southern gothic elements in our book, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the gothic elements of classic horror films by showing clips from Nosferatu, Dracula, Frankenstein, and Young Frankenstein. The students then try to come up with a check list of gothic elements to classify certain scenarios and argue if certain other films or literature- I use examples of movies they've seen like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Twilight, The Shining- would fall under the same category.